Oh for the love of God, Firefox admins, what's going on, does the sweet, sweet, wall candy taste good? Your Aunt Mom tell you you are a special little snowflake and never mind what the bad, bad real world has to say?
I love Firefox. I really do, but honestly, it's like they are trying to be as stupid as humanly possible. I'm getting sick of "my way or the highway" program developers breaking things and telling me that they've been fixed. Do you morons notice how your market share is shrinking? Do you notice that you're producing nothing but bad press these days and people are getting pissed off at you? So your answer to this is to get in everyone's face and tell them to suck it up or go away? What are you, Tea Party-ists?
I work in tech. I need version numbers to tell what the hell people have. "You have the latest version" lies all the time like a cheap rug.
Firefox - it's this type of attitude that got me to switch from Ubuntu, where they've developed the same attitude that negative feedback means they're doing the job right. Learn a lesson here or lose more market share.
Time to purge some MBAs from management, you bozos.
2. If the side effects of #1 are sufficiently bad for humans, it seems logical that over time, nature will select for people who have weaker overall immune systems. Can that be good?
Well, for better or worse, we're already affecting our evolution. If you're under the age of 35, you've never been vaccinated for smallpox, you've not encountered that virus so whatever immunity you have to the disease is residual from your ancestry, which had no choice but to select for smallpox resistance. All out the window now; you and your kids will have no need for such selection. And genes being the complicated little things they are, this may in turn have other seemingly unrelated consequences.
A percentage of our genetic makeup comes from viruses we've interacted with over time. By bathing, building sewers, refrigerating our food, using condoms, etc. we deliberately minimize our exposure to viruses. We're altering the course of our destiny. Good or bad, that's the road we're on. Actions have consequences and only time can tell if removing a source of genetic change (albeit one with frequently horrific consequences of its own) will pay off or not.
I hope so. I like people who wash themselves and don't poo on the rug and I'd like to think future humankind can get behind that sentiment too.
When Ubisoft makes it so a pirated version of their game provides better functionality and convenience than their own product, it is safe to say that they are NOT GETTING IT.
Gee, Ubisoft, I can give you money and be stuck with crippling and inconvenient DRM, or for free I can download a nice clean cracked copy that will play at once conveniently whenever and wherever I want it to. Decisions, decisions.
I blame MBAs. There is something in their sense of entitlement and smug assurance they know the best no matter what the facts may dictate that leads them to live out The Peter Principle and rise to levels of authority where they have no competence. I'll betcha there's some MBA or group of MBAs telling Ubisoft to stand firm on the DRM.
In the meantime, Valve will take my money without the crazy bullshit DRM and I can play my games even if the Internet is down. If I want to try an Ubisoft game, I'll know where to go.
And you sir are an idjut.
Money spent on space gets returned ten fold. Technology spinoffs, research, keeping technically trained people employed, motivated and at home, and the actual dollar amounts we're talking about are piddlingly small. Woohoo, cut NASA completely and you save 0.58% of your federal budget. That'll really change everything in some other way that provides more bang for the buck than ten-fold increase and new knowledge? You make me ashamed to be the same species with your give up and surrender, the Universe is too big for us talk.
Concerns over this and other issues such as copyright laws, digital rights management issues, the Digital Divide, and privacy have prompted the Chebucto Community Net and the Dalhousie Student Union to hold a public Internet Town Hall meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Monday, October 26th at 7 pm in the McInnes Room of the Dalhousie Student Union Building. I saw the notice on their website here: http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Current/CourtesyCCN.shtml
Their main speaker is Laura Murray, co-author of Canadian Copyright: A Citizenâ(TM)s Guide, and they've got speakers on the other issues too. They're calling it "Who's Shaping Your Digital Future?" and it's noteworthy for being the only meeting of its kind in the Atlantic Provinces. I don't know why they're not promoting this better, maybe they don't have the money or something, but I know I'll be going to it.
I wonder if anyone from the government or the mainstream media will be showing up.
I did suggest it. Seniors in my experience rely a lot on other seniors for support and while I agree with you that Linux is a good solution, in this case, it doesn't have the market penetration in this demographic it would need to in order for all her friends to be running it. Also, and I speak from experience here, setting up dialup internet access on Linux is a freaking nightmare since it is all but impossible to set up the vast majority of modems. Linux works great if you have highspeed but if you can afford highspeed, you can also afford Windows and new hardware.
It also needs to be said that support for Linux bites hard. When it's been set up properly and works great it's wonderful. When it isn't working properly it can be very user-hostile and difficult to trouble-shoot, especially for the novice computer user who already has a hard time grasping the difference between left and right mouse clicking, let alone figuring out using terminal and finding and typing in long strings of arcane commands.
I had this very conversation yesterday with a senior who insisted that left mouse is the one that always double clicks was too complicated. They said it was easy for people like me who knew computers but for someone like them it was impossible to grasp. I should send them to RTFM and decypher man pages? R-i-i-g-g-h-h-t But hey, maybe you know a sharper class of seniors than I do.
I'm not trying to start a Linux-Windows flame war, but Linux is not a one size fits all solution, at least not yet.
I don't see that many pirated Windows installs but the ones I do see are all from poor people who were given a bootleg XP or Windows 2000 disk with no product code and no questions asked. I mean, fair is fair and Microsoft is selling a product as a business not giving away their OS as a charity but in my experience the people they're hurting are the ones least able to help themselves.
The poor people I'm talking about here are usually seniors with little computer knowledge using out of date hardware and single parent families with few resources. They're not buying new computers and $150 for a Microsoft OS is too steep for their budget.
They're not leet hackers laughing at Microsoft, they're simple folk. One little old lady who had her computer in was completely
horrified when I told her that her Windows was pirated, she literally had no idea. Our policy is we don't help you once we discover your Windows is pirated for the simple reason that we have no way of knowing what has been done to the OS or what has been corrupted or is missing. In that case she came in a couple of months later with a legal Windows disk she'd saved up and bought and I installed it for her gratis. I know the price tag hurt her though but she would have no truck with illegal Windows.
Anyway, my point is that these folks are for the most part clueless and are ripe targets for botnetting since they lack the knowledge to acquire and keep an AV updated on their own. Free Avast and Free AVG are available to them but without handholding they'd never figure out how to jump through the hoops to download, install and set these up. The beauty of Microsoft Security Essentials is that they've made it pretty much self-running and idiot-proof. Like I said in my post yesterday, I'd push it out to everyone not already running an AV if I were Microsoft. It increases the general health of the Windows eco-system, makes Windows more secure and run better as a result, which in turn makes the Windows experience better for everyone and increases the likelihood of Windows purchases down the road through good word of mouth.
The leet hackers have the tools to look after themselves. If it were just them running pirated Windows, I'd agree with Microsoft and say stuff 'em. It's not though and things look a lot different on the bottom of the food chain; it's those most unable to protect themselves who get hurt the most.
It's a sweet little anti-virus program. A well designed and simple user interface, updates unobtrusively, doesn't bog down the computer and it is very effective at detecting all threats I've thrown its way. It also is easy to tell when it is unhappy thanks to a well designed and simple system tray icon. Credit where credit is due, Microsoft has put together a good program. I've tested this on dozens of machines and have not a single bad thing to say about it, which is not something I would have thought I'd ever say about a Microsoft product.
If I do have a quibble, it's that it requires a validated Windows. If I were Microsoft I'd throw this on automatic Windows Update and push it out to everyone not already running an anti-virus.
Symantec can blow me. I've seen more hosed computers where the owners thought they had current updated Symantec AV just to have me discover that their definitions had last been updated in 2007 or something with no indication from their Symantec AV they were vulnerable.
/not an MS fanboi but when they get one right, they deserve praise, and they got this one right folks.
Our graph looks even better - incoming mail is down to a quarter what it was. All the mail servers are ordering margaritas, they haven't seen incoming spam rates this low in years.
Okay, I'm sure I must have run into some Traci Lords pics at one time or another so it's a fair point. I've got to admit my mental kiddie porn standards would be anything being done sexually to a pre-pubescent more than hot pics of a sixteen year old, but technically both qualify, I suppose.
Busting producers of underage porn and seizing the materials would to my mind be a more constructive solution to the issue than putting in global internet filters, but maybe that's just me.
You know what? In a dozen years of actively surfing porn, I've never encountered kiddie porn in the wild. This great big threat to all mankind so severe that we all need to put woolly pullovers over all our electronic gear and filter all telecommunications is simply and plainly crap. It's a ruse.
There are some people who want to control everyone else. They want to control what you see, what you hear, and as much as is humanly possible, what you think. They want to monitor us all (but not themselves, of course) and make us all cookie-cutter little clones who all think the same harmless little thoughts and are all scared of their authority.
F * U * C * K them.
Anyone telling you this sort of "protection" is necessary is deluded or a liar. Either way, such people should be ignored or in extreme cases, put somewhere they cannot bring harm to others.
Back in the good old days people who leaked a big conspiracy disappeared. Ever since the first Kennedy assassination, the Powers That Be have discovered that the best way to deal with leaks is to just have more and more leaks and bury the truth in a million similar sounding lies.
Suppose Mitchell's right and there really is a big alien contact conspiracy that's being covered up? We've all seen so many photos of streetlights coming from crazy/misguided people that the best policy from the conspiracy's point of view would be to let him yammer on and throw out a lot of phony alien contact crap. They don't have to discredit him, we'd all do that for them.
All they need to do is keep him from getting at any legit relics storage so he can't go public with an alien tricorder or something that people can verify as ET in origin and the world will just think he's a loon.
That's the trouble with real earth-shaking truth, it sounds almost indistinguishable from lunacy. You gotta wonder if there is a percentage of our locked-away crazies who are telling us the truth and we're just too thick to see it.
This happened to me when my ISP bought some IP addresses from somewhere else. All the porn sites thought I was from a different country for about three months then it fixed itself.
I won't make the mistake again. I too got caught out by having that hacker tool from bleeding Microsoft, Process Explorer running. After a half hour wasted I figured it out and got the game going.
Games that require the original CD to play annoy the crap out of me. I have big hard drives, I can store a damn image on one for years and install and play the game when I feel like, even if I do misplace the CD. But not with these DRM pieces of crap.
Games that will only install 'x' number of times annoy me. What if I dual boot with Vista and with XP? Oh, there's two of my three installs gone right there. And if I swap out hardware to see what runs better? Too bad so sad.
Games that need online activation annoy me. If I want to haul that game out for a laugh five years from now will those activation servers still be online? Pfft, right.
So EA, enjoy the money for Mass Effect, I'm hoisting the Jolly Roger from now on with your products, and a cheery FU from me.
The kicker is that after a couple of hours of play my impression is the game isn't much fun anyway. I find it more annoying to play than fun and I hate a third person view I can't change to a first person view. Maybe some folks like that but I don't. So the lesson is to try the pirate version before even thinking of buying the game and if you really really feel the maker deserves money after that, buy the game and stick it on a shelf and keep playing the hassle-free pirate version.
My bad, I meant Osama, I really did. What are the odds of a presidential candidate and the world's leading terrorist having such similar (and relatively unusual in both cases) names at the same point in history?
1. When conferences are being organized, avoid US sites right there in the planning stage. (This is already happening in my field.)
2. When travelling to a US conference, travel with a blank default install Windows or Mac box with no personal or private data on it at all. Do not carry any form of data with you (whether encrypted or not). If it is necessary to access private data, do it over an encrypted connection to the non-US based home server using a terminal session. No data is stored on the portable computer. If the hard drive is seized, there is nothing to get.
(This is the solution being used by local doctors and lawyers travelling to the US where there are no privacy laws.)
Anything on your person when travelling to the US can be seized and you can be forced to give any passwords to anything encrypted.
Obama bin Laden must orgasm every single night at how spectacularly successful the 9/11 attacks were. It has to be the greatest success story of any kind thus far in the 21st century. Hate the guy all you want, he got everything he could ever want and then some.
My mail server gets 1.2 million spams a day compared to about 5,000 messages a day of legitimate traffic. My business has suffered from lost customers and lost business from mail delays caused by spam storms, much ill-will from customers has been caused and much time and money has been spent on anti-spam resources, not to mention all the lost technical time which could have gone into research and development of innovative products which instead gets wasted fighting spam storm related issues.
Spamming is not a first amendment issue, it is basic fraud and theft. Mega-jail sentences should be applied because the damage being done is major. It's not just a waste of bandwidth and people's time to delete the messages, it is real dollars and cents damage to the point where it is helping to drive my business under.
If one of my family members were a spammer, they'd be lucky to just have a busted nose and broken limbs. I'd go berzerker on their sorry ass. No mercy for spammers. None.
I was on the fence about Google until today. Datamining their email clients, being insecure, turning over dissidents to China, all circumstantial.
Today I saw my first Google ad for bulk emailers. I could not believe my eyes. I clicked on it to double check and sure enough, it was a real ad for a real bulk emailer guaranteeing 99% delivery and bullet-proof hosting.
Google, the friend of my enemy is my enemy. Support the spammers and you are no friend of mine. DIAF.
Oops, it can be also be someone out of the Attorney General's office getting your stuff with a National Security Letter (in addition to the afore-mentioned FBI, CIA and Pentagon). Under the Patriot Act data can be shared with other law enforcement agencies without you ever knowing you were the subject of such attention. Right, Mr Buttle, I mean Tuttle?
Now here's the thing - it's supposed to have a national security angle or be connected to terrorism or connected to money laundering for the super-snooper treatment, but consider for a moment how loosely these are now defined. The person who spikes trees in old growth forests is now a terrorist for example. Never mind that all the genuine card-carrying terrorists in the world would probably add up to less than a crappy gate at an NFL game, expanding the definition means there are millions of people to spy on, and that's not counting the inevitable mistakes of identity, etc.
And since the current US government is so trustworthy, we can all breath a sigh of relief that they would never, ever go after any personal enemies or make lists of people who simply don't agree with them and spy on them.
You guys want to know how bad this Canadians avoiding the US thing has become? Lawyers and local IT who might have peoples personal data on their laptops and are crossing the border into the US are being told to format their drives and only go with a vanilla software install. No other data storage media. If they need to access personal data they have to do it over an encrypted connection to their home server, and nothing can be downloaded and saved to the laptop as the data cannot physically be stored in the US.
A few years ago this level of security would have been considered tin foil hat time, now it is being implemented as standard operating procedure. Do you imagine that this is making people prefer to attend conferences not held in the US? Or to phrase that differently, to be more reluctant to attend US conferences?
No, I'm not confusing anything. Do a lookup on National Security Letters. Their power is greatly expanded under the Patriot Act. The upshot is if a high ranking FBI, CIA or Pentagon person or their designee wants some information, digital or physical, they can take it and not tell you about it for as long as they want. No judicial oversight and limited administrative oversight which has found that these "rules", as loose as they are, are still being broken lots of times. They can "sneak and peek" anything anytime.
Sure sounds like a free-for-all to me. Laws work differently than that.
About someone else's point about people and data bypassing the US, it is already happening. You'll never see that on US news though so try reading non-US newspapers and non-US news sources.
The trouble here is not Google, it is the fact there is no longer the rule of law with regards to data hosted in the United States. When the government can take any information they like from a server hosted in their country with no warrant, no notification, no nothing, then it's not law, it's criminal activity no matter who does it.
Here in Canada this has been a big deal now for the last couple of years. I've been at many IT meetings where tracking down what was hosted on US-based servers and removing it back to Canada has been on the agenda. We're not perfect here but we do have PIPEDA, the protection of privacy act, binding our ISPs. You need access to data, convince a judge and get a warrant. That's the rule of law.
That this US government data free-for-all has not been a big deal to American sysadmins has been a source of more than a little concern and confusion to us here north of the border. As long as there remains an Emperor in the White House rather than a President I guess there will be no movement on this.
Erased White House email, backups, and hard drives without penalty despite a legal court order? That's some government you guys have running there. You might want to do something about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh for the love of God, Firefox admins, what's going on, does the sweet, sweet, wall candy taste good? Your Aunt Mom tell you you are a special little snowflake and never mind what the bad, bad real world has to say?
I love Firefox. I really do, but honestly, it's like they are trying to be as stupid as humanly possible. I'm getting sick of "my way or the highway" program developers breaking things and telling me that they've been fixed. Do you morons notice how your market share is shrinking? Do you notice that you're producing nothing but bad press these days and people are getting pissed off at you? So your answer to this is to get in everyone's face and tell them to suck it up or go away? What are you, Tea Party-ists?
I work in tech. I need version numbers to tell what the hell people have. "You have the latest version" lies all the time like a cheap rug.
Firefox - it's this type of attitude that got me to switch from Ubuntu, where they've developed the same attitude that negative feedback means they're doing the job right. Learn a lesson here or lose more market share.
Time to purge some MBAs from management, you bozos.
2. If the side effects of #1 are sufficiently bad for humans, it seems logical that over time, nature will select for people who have weaker overall immune systems. Can that be good?
Well, for better or worse, we're already affecting our evolution. If you're under the age of 35, you've never been vaccinated for smallpox, you've not encountered that virus so whatever immunity you have to the disease is residual from your ancestry, which had no choice but to select for smallpox resistance. All out the window now; you and your kids will have no need for such selection. And genes being the complicated little things they are, this may in turn have other seemingly unrelated consequences.
A percentage of our genetic makeup comes from viruses we've interacted with over time. By bathing, building sewers, refrigerating our food, using condoms, etc. we deliberately minimize our exposure to viruses. We're altering the course of our destiny. Good or bad, that's the road we're on. Actions have consequences and only time can tell if removing a source of genetic change (albeit one with frequently horrific consequences of its own) will pay off or not.
I hope so. I like people who wash themselves and don't poo on the rug and I'd like to think future humankind can get behind that sentiment too.
.
When Ubisoft makes it so a pirated version of their game provides better functionality and convenience than their own product, it is safe to say that they are NOT GETTING IT.
Gee, Ubisoft, I can give you money and be stuck with crippling and inconvenient DRM, or for free I can download a nice clean cracked copy that will play at once conveniently whenever and wherever I want it to. Decisions, decisions.
I blame MBAs. There is something in their sense of entitlement and smug assurance they know the best no matter what the facts may dictate that leads them to live out The Peter Principle and rise to levels of authority where they have no competence. I'll betcha there's some MBA or group of MBAs telling Ubisoft to stand firm on the DRM.
In the meantime, Valve will take my money without the crazy bullshit DRM and I can play my games even if the Internet is down. If I want to try an Ubisoft game, I'll know where to go.
And you sir are an idjut. Money spent on space gets returned ten fold. Technology spinoffs, research, keeping technically trained people employed, motivated and at home, and the actual dollar amounts we're talking about are piddlingly small. Woohoo, cut NASA completely and you save 0.58% of your federal budget. That'll really change everything in some other way that provides more bang for the buck than ten-fold increase and new knowledge? You make me ashamed to be the same species with your give up and surrender, the Universe is too big for us talk.
Whoa, some crazy apostrophe action there. Sorry about that.
Concerns over this and other issues such as copyright laws, digital rights management issues, the Digital Divide, and privacy have prompted the Chebucto Community Net and the Dalhousie Student Union to hold a public Internet Town Hall meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Monday, October 26th at 7 pm in the McInnes Room of the Dalhousie Student Union Building. I saw the notice on their website here: http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Current/CourtesyCCN.shtml
Their main speaker is Laura Murray, co-author of Canadian Copyright: A Citizenâ(TM)s Guide, and they've got speakers on the other issues too. They're calling it "Who's Shaping Your Digital Future?" and it's noteworthy for being the only meeting of its kind in the Atlantic Provinces. I don't know why they're not promoting this better, maybe they don't have the money or something, but I know I'll be going to it.
I wonder if anyone from the government or the mainstream media will be showing up.
I did suggest it. Seniors in my experience rely a lot on other seniors for support and while I agree with you that Linux is a good solution, in this case, it doesn't have the market penetration in this demographic it would need to in order for all her friends to be running it. Also, and I speak from experience here, setting up dialup internet access on Linux is a freaking nightmare since it is all but impossible to set up the vast majority of modems. Linux works great if you have highspeed but if you can afford highspeed, you can also afford Windows and new hardware.
It also needs to be said that support for Linux bites hard. When it's been set up properly and works great it's wonderful. When it isn't working properly it can be very user-hostile and difficult to trouble-shoot, especially for the novice computer user who already has a hard time grasping the difference between left and right mouse clicking, let alone figuring out using terminal and finding and typing in long strings of arcane commands.
I had this very conversation yesterday with a senior who insisted that left mouse is the one that always double clicks was too complicated. They said it was easy for people like me who knew computers but for someone like them it was impossible to grasp. I should send them to RTFM and decypher man pages? R-i-i-g-g-h-h-t But hey, maybe you know a sharper class of seniors than I do.
I'm not trying to start a Linux-Windows flame war, but Linux is not a one size fits all solution, at least not yet.
I don't see that many pirated Windows installs but the ones I do see are all from poor people who were given a bootleg XP or Windows 2000 disk with no product code and no questions asked. I mean, fair is fair and Microsoft is selling a product as a business not giving away their OS as a charity but in my experience the people they're hurting are the ones least able to help themselves.
The poor people I'm talking about here are usually seniors with little computer knowledge using out of date hardware and single parent families with few resources. They're not buying new computers and $150 for a Microsoft OS is too steep for their budget.
They're not leet hackers laughing at Microsoft, they're simple folk. One little old lady who had her computer in was completely horrified when I told her that her Windows was pirated, she literally had no idea. Our policy is we don't help you once we discover your Windows is pirated for the simple reason that we have no way of knowing what has been done to the OS or what has been corrupted or is missing. In that case she came in a couple of months later with a legal Windows disk she'd saved up and bought and I installed it for her gratis. I know the price tag hurt her though but she would have no truck with illegal Windows.
Anyway, my point is that these folks are for the most part clueless and are ripe targets for botnetting since they lack the knowledge to acquire and keep an AV updated on their own. Free Avast and Free AVG are available to them but without handholding they'd never figure out how to jump through the hoops to download, install and set these up. The beauty of Microsoft Security Essentials is that they've made it pretty much self-running and idiot-proof. Like I said in my post yesterday, I'd push it out to everyone not already running an AV if I were Microsoft. It increases the general health of the Windows eco-system, makes Windows more secure and run better as a result, which in turn makes the Windows experience better for everyone and increases the likelihood of Windows purchases down the road through good word of mouth.
The leet hackers have the tools to look after themselves. If it were just them running pirated Windows, I'd agree with Microsoft and say stuff 'em. It's not though and things look a lot different on the bottom of the food chain; it's those most unable to protect themselves who get hurt the most.
It's a sweet little anti-virus program. A well designed and simple user interface, updates unobtrusively, doesn't bog down the computer and it is very effective at detecting all threats I've thrown its way. It also is easy to tell when it is unhappy thanks to a well designed and simple system tray icon. Credit where credit is due, Microsoft has put together a good program. I've tested this on dozens of machines and have not a single bad thing to say about it, which is not something I would have thought I'd ever say about a Microsoft product.
If I do have a quibble, it's that it requires a validated Windows. If I were Microsoft I'd throw this on automatic Windows Update and push it out to everyone not already running an anti-virus.
Symantec can blow me. I've seen more hosed computers where the owners thought they had current updated Symantec AV just to have me discover that their definitions had last been updated in 2007 or something with no indication from their Symantec AV they were vulnerable.
Our graph looks even better - incoming mail is down to a quarter what it was. All the mail servers are ordering margaritas, they haven't seen incoming spam rates this low in years.
Okay, I'm sure I must have run into some Traci Lords pics at one time or another so it's a fair point. I've got to admit my mental kiddie porn standards would be anything being done sexually to a pre-pubescent more than hot pics of a sixteen year old, but technically both qualify, I suppose.
Busting producers of underage porn and seizing the materials would to my mind be a more constructive solution to the issue than putting in global internet filters, but maybe that's just me.
You know what? In a dozen years of actively surfing porn, I've never encountered kiddie porn in the wild. This great big threat to all mankind so severe that we all need to put woolly pullovers over all our electronic gear and filter all telecommunications is simply and plainly crap. It's a ruse.
There are some people who want to control everyone else. They want to control what you see, what you hear, and as much as is humanly possible, what you think. They want to monitor us all (but not themselves, of course) and make us all cookie-cutter little clones who all think the same harmless little thoughts and are all scared of their authority.
F * U * C * K them.
Anyone telling you this sort of "protection" is necessary is deluded or a liar. Either way, such people should be ignored or in extreme cases, put somewhere they cannot bring harm to others.
Back in the good old days people who leaked a big conspiracy disappeared. Ever since the first Kennedy assassination, the Powers That Be have discovered that the best way to deal with leaks is to just have more and more leaks and bury the truth in a million similar sounding lies.
Suppose Mitchell's right and there really is a big alien contact conspiracy that's being covered up? We've all seen so many photos of streetlights coming from crazy/misguided people that the best policy from the conspiracy's point of view would be to let him yammer on and throw out a lot of phony alien contact crap. They don't have to discredit him, we'd all do that for them.
All they need to do is keep him from getting at any legit relics storage so he can't go public with an alien tricorder or something that people can verify as ET in origin and the world will just think he's a loon.
That's the trouble with real earth-shaking truth, it sounds almost indistinguishable from lunacy. You gotta wonder if there is a percentage of our locked-away crazies who are telling us the truth and we're just too thick to see it.
This happened to me when my ISP bought some IP addresses from somewhere else. All the porn sites thought I was from a different country for about three months then it fixed itself.
I bought Mass Effect for the PC. Fool that I am.
I won't make the mistake again. I too got caught out by having that hacker tool from bleeding Microsoft, Process Explorer running. After a half hour wasted I figured it out and got the game going.
Games that require the original CD to play annoy the crap out of me. I have big hard drives, I can store a damn image on one for years and install and play the game when I feel like, even if I do misplace the CD. But not with these DRM pieces of crap.
Games that will only install 'x' number of times annoy me. What if I dual boot with Vista and with XP? Oh, there's two of my three installs gone right there. And if I swap out hardware to see what runs better? Too bad so sad.
Games that need online activation annoy me. If I want to haul that game out for a laugh five years from now will those activation servers still be online? Pfft, right.
So EA, enjoy the money for Mass Effect, I'm hoisting the Jolly Roger from now on with your products, and a cheery FU from me.
The kicker is that after a couple of hours of play my impression is the game isn't much fun anyway. I find it more annoying to play than fun and I hate a third person view I can't change to a first person view. Maybe some folks like that but I don't. So the lesson is to try the pirate version before even thinking of buying the game and if you really really feel the maker deserves money after that, buy the game and stick it on a shelf and keep playing the hassle-free pirate version.
My bad, I meant Osama, I really did. What are the odds of a presidential candidate and the world's leading terrorist having such similar (and relatively unusual in both cases) names at the same point in history?
1. When conferences are being organized, avoid US sites right there in the planning stage. (This is already happening in my field.)
2. When travelling to a US conference, travel with a blank default install Windows or Mac box with no personal or private data on it at all. Do not carry any form of data with you (whether encrypted or not). If it is necessary to access private data, do it over an encrypted connection to the non-US based home server using a terminal session. No data is stored on the portable computer. If the hard drive is seized, there is nothing to get. (This is the solution being used by local doctors and lawyers travelling to the US where there are no privacy laws.)
Anything on your person when travelling to the US can be seized and you can be forced to give any passwords to anything encrypted.
Obama bin Laden must orgasm every single night at how spectacularly successful the 9/11 attacks were. It has to be the greatest success story of any kind thus far in the 21st century. Hate the guy all you want, he got everything he could ever want and then some.
Number 1: More intelligence. Hoo boy do we need this one implemented ASAP.
Number 2: Respiratory bypass system. No more choking to death on pretzels.
Number 3: Two hearts. Works for the Time Lords, howzabout it working for us?
Number 4: Reinforced cerebral circulatory system. No more strokes.
Number 5: Smarter immune system. Get rid of cancer and AIDS before they start, no more auto-immune diseases.
Number 6: Smart metabolism. Good-bye unwanted pounds, save your ass if you crash in the Andes without making your co-survivors menu items.
And so on. Look, we can stand some species improving. Save the default in the genes as a backup and let's get splicing here.
Forgot to mention, spam has tripled in the last eight weeks after doubling twice in the six months before that.
Victimless crime, my Aunt Fanny. Death is too good for the spammers.
My mail server gets 1.2 million spams a day compared to about 5,000 messages a day of legitimate traffic. My business has suffered from lost customers and lost business from mail delays caused by spam storms, much ill-will from customers has been caused and much time and money has been spent on anti-spam resources, not to mention all the lost technical time which could have gone into research and development of innovative products which instead gets wasted fighting spam storm related issues.
Spamming is not a first amendment issue, it is basic fraud and theft. Mega-jail sentences should be applied because the damage being done is major. It's not just a waste of bandwidth and people's time to delete the messages, it is real dollars and cents damage to the point where it is helping to drive my business under.
If one of my family members were a spammer, they'd be lucky to just have a busted nose and broken limbs. I'd go berzerker on their sorry ass. No mercy for spammers. None.
Today I saw my first Google ad for bulk emailers. I could not believe my eyes. I clicked on it to double check and sure enough, it was a real ad for a real bulk emailer guaranteeing 99% delivery and bullet-proof hosting.
Google, the friend of my enemy is my enemy. Support the spammers and you are no friend of mine. DIAF.
No, you've got that wrong. First we heat the data center buildings then we pay extra to cool the server rooms off. :)
You'd think we'd be smarter than that, huh?
Oops, it can be also be someone out of the Attorney General's office getting your stuff with a National Security Letter (in addition to the afore-mentioned FBI, CIA and Pentagon). Under the Patriot Act data can be shared with other law enforcement agencies without you ever knowing you were the subject of such attention. Right, Mr Buttle, I mean Tuttle?
Now here's the thing - it's supposed to have a national security angle or be connected to terrorism or connected to money laundering for the super-snooper treatment, but consider for a moment how loosely these are now defined. The person who spikes trees in old growth forests is now a terrorist for example. Never mind that all the genuine card-carrying terrorists in the world would probably add up to less than a crappy gate at an NFL game, expanding the definition means there are millions of people to spy on, and that's not counting the inevitable mistakes of identity, etc.
And since the current US government is so trustworthy, we can all breath a sigh of relief that they would never, ever go after any personal enemies or make lists of people who simply don't agree with them and spy on them.
You guys want to know how bad this Canadians avoiding the US thing has become? Lawyers and local IT who might have peoples personal data on their laptops and are crossing the border into the US are being told to format their drives and only go with a vanilla software install. No other data storage media. If they need to access personal data they have to do it over an encrypted connection to their home server, and nothing can be downloaded and saved to the laptop as the data cannot physically be stored in the US.
A few years ago this level of security would have been considered tin foil hat time, now it is being implemented as standard operating procedure. Do you imagine that this is making people prefer to attend conferences not held in the US? Or to phrase that differently, to be more reluctant to attend US conferences?
Sure sounds like a free-for-all to me. Laws work differently than that.
About someone else's point about people and data bypassing the US, it is already happening. You'll never see that on US news though so try reading non-US newspapers and non-US news sources.
Here in Canada this has been a big deal now for the last couple of years. I've been at many IT meetings where tracking down what was hosted on US-based servers and removing it back to Canada has been on the agenda. We're not perfect here but we do have PIPEDA, the protection of privacy act, binding our ISPs. You need access to data, convince a judge and get a warrant. That's the rule of law.
That this US government data free-for-all has not been a big deal to American sysadmins has been a source of more than a little concern and confusion to us here north of the border. As long as there remains an Emperor in the White House rather than a President I guess there will be no movement on this.
Erased White House email, backups, and hard drives without penalty despite a legal court order? That's some government you guys have running there. You might want to do something about it.